Most of my December was spent making our first west coast Christmas perfect. I sent out close to a 100 holiday cards with cheery notes which I wrote while listening to nothing but Christmas music. Santa’s were on display all over our new home, lights were strung and lit. We fully engaged ourselves in all the festivities, shopping and cooking and baking, while wearing silly hats. As you might have guessed from this idyllic opening the holiday could not live up to my hype. But it did not stop my push to make our New Year’s eve filled with all the garnishes I could throw at it. Yes, lesson not learned. Thankfully sense and sensibility did surface, eventually, to the realization that we were indeed somewhere new, and quite possibly, I could slow down, take a breath and notice all the possibilities in this here.

Being determined that sound adjustment was not my first inclination. In fact, I started new year’s day by printing out goal docs for us to fill out and grabbed a big bag of markers to make it all look pretty. The printer had other plans and ran out of black ink in the middle of the job. I was not deterred and hand wrote the questions that seemed vital to get our resolutions started on the right foot. In retrospect I could chalk my misplaced enthusiasm to being sleep-deprived and hungover, but it’s really just wanting to control something in my unchartered terrain. Superstition, fear, fomo, losing parts of me that I did not realize were integral to my mental stability, all got tossed into the blender and I found myself having no energy to plot out resolutions, in fact, the whole notion seemed preposterous. And then a dear friend sent me this brilliant and timely poem by David Gate.

Yes, yes, I responded, this is what I am feeling. It is winter, even here, under a bright blue sky with temps that remind us of June, and therefore it is still the time to stop. Return to the core. This moment has little need for resolutions or challenges or even deprivations, but a space for observation, yes, perhaps.

If you have been a Nine Cent Girl reader for a while you know what January used to look like in my world. A black and white landscape that took grit and good gear to venture across, but it also curtailed the outward and instead invited one to look within. I have written much about winter, as I did in this post, “Begin Again” from 2021. There are two reasons I would direct you back, first because snowy images are beautiful, but also because it introduces Katherine May’s book, “Wintering.”

Katherine May writes, “If happiness is a skill, then sadness is, too. Perhaps through all those years at school, or perhaps through other terrors, we are taught to ignore sadness, to stuff it down into our satchels and pretend it isn’t there. That is wintering. It is the active acceptance of sadness. It is the practice of allowing ourselves to feel it as a need. It is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can. Wintering is a moment of intuition, our true needs felt keenly as a knife.” On cue, this is where I am, again.

As I wrote in another post way back on January 3, 2011, “Resolutions fall flat because they are made of the same nonsense. They are comprised of a temporary will and a false theory about what you should be doing, or thinking about, or acting or looking like. On the other hand is obsession, that idea or passion that wakes you from your slumber and propels you without Oprah’s chastising, or Dr. Phil’s reprimands, or even the well-intended advice from your mother-brother-best friend-or spouse. ”

Today I am reminded of obsessions that have served me well, like diving into life, saying yes far more than no, to loving myself, and to facing winter. Here in southern California January does not come with an arctic blast but if you stop long enough wintering will surface all the same.